The patent or application file contains at least one drawing executed in color. Copies of this patent or patent application publication with color drawing(s) will be provided by the Office upon request and payment of necessary fee.
Color images such as digital photographs are currently editable in a variety of ways. For example, it is common in digital image editing to modify an image selectively. That is, an editing operation may be intended to be performed on only a portion of the entire image. Selective editing operations include copying or cutting to the clipboard, color modification (adjusting brightness, saturation hue, contrast, etc.), smoothing, sharpening or removing noise. To perform such an operation, however, a user must be capable of somehow communicating to the software which pixels of the digital image belong to the portion to be edited and which do not. It is further common in such cases that the set of pixels to be isolated for editing correspond to an actual object that existed in the scene that was photographed or otherwise digitally captured. For example, in a portrait, the user may wish to change the color of a subject's shirt. Therefore, it may be desired to select only those pixels corresponding to the fabric of the shirt. But even though the shirt may be made from a single solidly-colored fabric, the desired pixels may show color variations due to the interaction of scene lighting with the folds of the fabric. The challenge for the user would then be to select only the color variations of the shirt, without also including colors that do not belong to the shirt.
Existing solutions for isolating a portion of an image include selection tools such as a so-called “lasso” tool, where the user must carefully and manually trace around the region of the image, and the so-called “magic wand” tool, which performs color matching based on the encoded RGB pixel values; a method that models no physical principles of illumination nor any perceptual color attributes of the human visual system. In either case, general image editing tools require considerable experience, skill, experimentation and/or tenacity in the user. The best choice in any particular situation may further depend upon the color matching task at hand. Even when the best conventional tool is chosen, it can be difficult to adjust the controls, particularly the tolerance, to provide the desired color or object identification or selection. Moreover, it is often the case that desired results cannot be obtained, particularly in color matching for selecting shading variations of a base color.
A practical example of this problem may be that of an online clothing merchandiser offering a particular style of a particular garment, but in several base fabric colors. It could prove beneficial to such an enterprise to have the ability to easily create digital images which could alternatively show any of a range of available colors, but without the need to take multiple photographs. A practical benefit would be obtained if they were able to easily, realistically and accurately select a colored object apart from any other portion of the digital image and then change the color of the selected object, after-the-fact, from a single photograph of a model.